VIG Spawns are a lie

[oddible]

VIG doesn't seem to follow the normal rules. They don't have to buy their ships apparently. VIG ships spawn at the edges of space like a dark corner of Eighteen Billion. They didn't get made in the wharfs and shipyards of Windfall. So there is no attrition with VIG apparently. They will spawn endlessly and in numbers far greater than any other faction. It is insane!

[Malchar]

It is not a new features. All pirates factions act like that. Scale plate green minotaur and L destroyers for exemple are not build in shipyards, but spawn from tin air. They even never dock on pirates station for what I know.
I made the experience (in the V2 IIRC) where I killed everyone and turned the map in green but pirates still spawned from nowhere. In an other game I sent scout ships to follow these pirates ships for a long time. They really have no relations (but the name and tags) with the faction they are supposed to be linked with.

Summary ; they is nothing new on vig behaviour.

Point I disapproved this system several years ago, and still disagree.

[oddible]

Yeah if VIG were small like SCA or Kha'ak that would be one thing but they're not. Their spawns are massive and frequent. It seems the only recourse is to befriend them because conventional warfare can't get control of them.

[Malchar]

I can forgive kha ak and imagine they were hidden at the surface or inside an asteroid and disturbed by mining laser. Pirates however are not xenomorph and cant have the benefit of such excuses. Rgosoft clearly use cheap methods to spawn pirates, and I doubt most players approve it.

[Nanook]

The way it was explained by the devs, way back aroung version 2, at least for the Kha'ak, Xenon and SCA, was that the game took currently existing ships from other sectors and 'jumped' them to another sector, at the edges or beyond. However, they are originally produced at those factions' shipyards/stations, and not spawned out of nothing. This is probably what happens for VIG as well. The way to counter that is to destroy the VIG shipyard/wharf.

[oddible]

OK good to know - that there is a source!

[Baddieus]

The way to counter that is to destroy the VIG shipyard/wharf

I certainly hope this is true because my character (role playing) has taken issue with their food control scheme & was planning on wiping out all the VIG stations & planting my own flag in those sectors. This will happen later of course when a certain plot turns them all against me and I have stations/fleet enough to take on the challenge. I'm also hoping that all Food/Water/Ice will once again be legal in all sectors & no longer show otherwise when trading these items.

=Baddieus=

[Malchar]

The way it was explained by the devs, way back aroung version 2, at least for the Kha'ak, Xenon and SCA, was that the game took currently existing ships from other sectors and 'jumped' them to another sector, at the edges or beyond. However, they are originally produced at those factions' shipyards/stations, and not spawned out of nothing. This is probably what happens for VIG as well. The way to counter that is to destroy the VIG shipyard/wharf.

I will be courteous and say I disagree.

Below a picture of a game may be in V2.6. Like you can see the universe is under control and nothing can happen without I know it. There is no shipyard except mine and they produce only for me. Anyway there is no more alive customers. Anyway pirate comtinue to spawn form tin air. They cant have jumped from other sector (and cant had been build in a shipyard), all sectors are owned and controlled by me, celestian emperor of the visible and invisible world.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... rbox=false

[oddible]

Well this will always happen - you can't completely wipe any faction out of the game I think. I suspect the intent is that most of the ships would come from a wharf / shipyard but even without those some few will still spawn.

[Malchar]

you can't completely wipe any faction out of the game I think.

No you cant. But you can forbid them to do anything. In the exemple, above factions can try to build new stations there is no one alive, and not a single builder to start the construction, nor a single fraighter to transport raw.

[oddible]

So just so I'm clear, if I finish these three missions will the VIG start playing by normal rules again? By normal rules I mean will their ships actually require resources and a production chain to build vs appearing out of thin air with zero source? Because currently, and maybe it is just part of this mission chain, they have endless supplies of Kyds and Barbarossas. Like, there is zero way that their current number of factories can produce this many ships. There is zero way to wear them down through attrition.

[Malchar]

I dont play missions and have a poor opinion of plot with chain missions, so I cant answer for sure.

What I can say is, in a game or two, I destroyed all pirates s bases/stations (SPG IIRC) and even conquered all sectors of the universe, heavilly patrolling each, but it didnt prevented pirates ships to magically spawn for nowhere (and from nothing).

[j.harshaw]

About time someone mentioned running into syndicate ships outside of Windfall. No, this isn't tied to the encounters mechanic. They are built in Windfall and fly to the fringes of various sectors to support any other syndicate ships operating closer to the sector cores. Also why a lot of people have mentioned there sometimes being a very large number of syndicate fighters in Windfall.

[oddible]

About time someone mentioned running into syndicate ships outside of Windfall. No, this isn't tied to the encounters mechanic. They are built in Windfall and fly to the fringes of various sectors to support any other syndicate ships operating closer to the sector cores. Also why a lot of people have mentioned there sometimes being a very large number of syndicate fighters in Windfall.

Are you saying that if I destroy the VIG Wharf in Windfall and I keep killing VIG fighters that they will eventually thin out until they build another one? Because there is zero way that with the number of miners / wrecks they have in Windfall and Avarice that the VIG economy is actually producing enough wares to build all those ships at that wharf. That wharf is building ships out of thin air (or more likely Ice).

[Raptor34]

About time someone mentioned running into syndicate ships outside of Windfall. No, this isn't tied to the encounters mechanic. They are built in Windfall and fly to the fringes of various sectors to support any other syndicate ships operating closer to the sector cores. Also why a lot of people have mentioned there sometimes being a very large number of syndicate fighters in Windfall.

Are you saying that if I destroy the VIG Wharf in Windfall and I keep killing VIG fighters that they will eventually thin out until they build another one?

I mean mine thinned out pretty quick around the target station.
Was surprised I didn't have to fight all the rest of the swarms in the other 2.5 sectors, or maybe I had to but my traders there was drawing too much of their attention, that and my wharf pumping out Yaki ships. Lost some small stuff and 2 trading aux ships iirc. Then again I got lucky that my target was literally next to the BHS gate.

[Imperial Good]

After going on a rampage during the plot VIG was unable to replace any significant amount of their fighter swarm for 4+ hours. Their economy is really terrible.

Then I started selling ships to them. After ordering literally hundreds of ships from me they now have a fully padded out fighter swarm again.

From the surface it does not appear they spawn ships in.

[Manawydn]

I can forgive kha ak and imagine they were hidden at the surface or inside an asteroid and disturbed by mining laser. Pirates however are not xenomorph and cant have the benefit of such excuses. Rgosoft clearly use cheap methods to spawn pirates, and I doubt most players approve it.

I definitely agree with that last part - spawning anything in-game is pretty off-putting for me, with one exception. Khaak. And the reason for that is lore-based. Though they were nearly annihilated during Operation Final Fury back in X3TC, they still have access to, and use point-to-point jumpdrives. So Khaak get a pass, but yeah, everything else needs to stop spawning in, or "jumping" to the player with the cheap, cheezy encounters mechanic. I removed encounters from my (modded) games.

[oddible]

Haha, we love the impactful economy of X4 so much that now we insist that it applies to everything!

[oddible]

But the VIG seem to have an alternate economy, like the Xenon right? The Xenon produce ships from Energy. The VIG produce ships from ICE? They literally have zero other stations except Spice and I don't see any transport ships either theirs or other factions constantly running back and forth to the Wharf and Shipyard. So their Wharf and Shipyard and a faked production - this honestly is so against the core tenet of X4, where the economies are real, that it is super frustrating. Even the Xenon actually have to mine to produce stuff but the VIG don't seem to.

I've been killing their ships by the hundreds for hours... but they never seem to have any less.

https://i.imgur.com/1TdDnsy.png

[Admiral Sausage]

But the VIG seem to have an alternate economy, like the Xenon right? The Xenon produce ships from Energy. The VIG produce ships from ICE? They literally have zero other stations except Spice and I don't see any transport ships either theirs or other factions constantly running back and forth to the Wharf and Shipyard. So their Wharf and Shipyard and a faked production - this honestly is so against the core tenet of X4, where the economies are real, that it is super frustrating. Even the Xenon actually have to mine to produce stuff but the VIG don't seem to.

I've been killing their ships by the hundreds for hours... but they never seem to have any less.

That could be simply because their ships are very cheap - only 40 hull parts for a Kyd. A wharf might contain enough to produce hundreds of them before it runs out, and a single Barbarossa slipping through can restock it enough for dozens more.

In my game I destroyed all the VIG stations apart from their wharf and shipyard, and they eventually stopped producing ships. I had to let them rebuild a couple of stations before they could produce any more for me to capture, and now they only make one or two an hour.